Sharpe's Triumph s-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  "I like to offer a proper salute to a fellow Englishman," the tall man explained to Leonard. "You are English, aren't you?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Too many damned Scots in the Company," the tall man grumbled. "Have you ever noticed that, Leonard? Too many Scots and Irish. Glib sorts of fellow, they are, but they ain't English. Not English at all."

  The visitor drew his sword, then took a deep breath.

  "Company!" he shouted. "Level arms!"

  The sepoys brought their muskets to their shoulders and Leonard saw, much too late, that the guns were aimed at the troops of the garrison.

  "No!" he said, but not loudly, for he still did not believe what he saw.

  "Fire!" the officer shouted, and the parade ground air was murdered by the double ripple of musket shots, heavy coughing explosions that blossomed smoke across the sun-crazed mud and slammed lead balls into the unsuspecting garrison. "Hunt them now!" the tall officer called. "Hunt them! Fast, fast, fast!"

  He spurred his horse close to Captain Leonard and, almost casually, slashed down with his sword, ripping the blade hard back once it had bitten into the Captain's neck so that its edge sawed fast and deep through the sinew, muscle and flesh.

  "Hunt them! Hunt them!" the officer shouted as Leonard fell. He drew a pistol from his saddle holster and rode towards the officers' tents.

  His men were screaming their war cries as they spread through the small fort to chase down every last sepoy of Chasalgaon's garrison. They had been ordered to leave the women and children to the last and hunt down the men first.

  * * *

  Crosby had been staring in horror and disbelief, and now, with shaking hands, he started to load one of his pistols, but suddenly the door of his tent darkened and he saw that the tall officer had dismounted from his horse.

  "Are you Crosby?" the officer demanded.

  Crosby found he could not speak. His hands quivered. Sweat was pouring down his face.

  "Are you Crosby?" the man asked again in an irritated voice.

  "Yes," Crosby managed to say. "And who the devil are you?"

  "Dodd," the tall man said, "Major William Dodd, at your service." And Dodd raised his big pistol so that it pointed at Crosby's face.

  "No!" Crosby shouted.

  Dodd smiled.

  "I assume you're surrendering the fort to me, Crosby?"

  "Damn you," Crosby riposted feebly.

  "You drink too much, Major," Dodd said. "The whole Company knows you're a sot. Didn't put up much of a fight, did you?"

  He pulled the trigger and Crosby's head was snatched back in a mist of blood that spattered onto the canvas.

  "Pity you're English," Dodd said. "I'd much rather shoot a Scotsman."

  The dying Major made a terrible gurgling sound, then his body jerked uncontrollably and was finally still.

  "Praise the Lord, pull down the flag and find the pay chest," Dodd said to himself, then he stepped over the Major's corpse to see that the pay chest was where he expected it to be, under the bed.

  "Subadar?"

  "Sahib?"

  "Two men here to guard the pay chest."

  "Sahib!"

  Major Dodd hurried back onto the parade ground where a small group of redcoats, British redcoats, were offering defiance, and he wanted to make sure that his sepoys took care of them, but a havildar had anticipated Dodd's orders and was leading a squad of men against the half-dozen soldiers.

  "Put the blades in!" Dodd encouraged them. "Hard in! Twist them in! That's the way! Watch your left! Left!" His voice was urgent for a tall sergeant had suddenly appeared from behind the cook house — a white man with a musket and bayonet in his hands, but one of the sepoys still had a loaded musket of his own and he twisted, aimed and fired and Dodd saw another mist of bright blood sparkle in the sunlight. The sergeant had been hit in the head. He stopped, looked surprised as the musket fell from his hands and as blood streamed down his face, then he fell backwards and was still.

  "Search for the rest of the bastards!" Dodd ordered, knowing that there must still be a score of the garrison hidden in the barracks.

  Some of the men had escaped over the thorn wall, but they would be hunted down by the Mahratta horsemen who were Dodd's allies and who should by now have spread either side of the fort.

  "Search hard!" He himself went to look at the horses of the garrison's officers and decided that one of them was marginally better than his own. He moved his saddle to the better horse, then led it into the sunlight and picketed it to the flagpole. A woman ran past him, screaming as she fled from the red-coated killers, but a sepoy caught and tripped her and another pulled the said off her shoulder. Dodd was about to order them away from the woman, then he reckoned that the enemy was well beaten and so his men could take their pleasure in safety.

  "Subadar?" he shouted.

  "Sahib?"

  "One squad to make sure everyone's dead. Another to open the armoury. And there are a couple of horses in the stable. Pick one for yourself, and we'll take the other back to Pohlmann. And well done, Gopal."

  "Thank you, sahib," Subadar Gopal said.

  Dodd wiped the blood from his sword, then reloaded his pistol. One of the fallen redcoats was trying to turn himself over, so Dodd crossed to the wounded man, watched his feeble efforts for a moment, then put a bullet into the man's head. The man jerked in spasm, then was still.

  Major Dodd scowled at the blood that had sprayed his boots, but he spat, stooped and wiped the blood away.

  * * *

  Sharpe watched the tall officer from the corner of his eye. He felt responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared.

  The blood had poured from the wound in his scalp. He was dizzy, his head throbbed, but he was alive. There were flies in his mouth. And then his ammunition began to explode and the tall officer whipped round, thinking it was trouble, and a couple of men laughed at the sight of the ashes bursting into the air with each small crack of powder.

  Sharpe dared not move. He listened to women screaming and children crying, then heard hooves and he waited until some horsemen came into view. They were Indians, of course, and all wild-looking men with sabres, matchlocks, spears, lances and even bows and arrows. They slid out of their saddles and joined the hunt for loot.

  Sharpe lay like the dead. The crusting blood was thick on his face.

  The blow of the musket ball had stunned him, so that he did not remember dropping his own musket or falling to the ground, but he sensed that the blow was not deadly. Not even deep. He had a headache, and the skin of his face felt taut with the crusted blood, but he knew head wounds always bled profusely. He tried to make his breathing shallow, left his mouth open and did not even gag when a fly crawled down to the root of his tongue, and then he could smell tobacco, arrack, leather and sweat and a horseman was bending over him with a horrid-looking curved knife with a rusty blade and Sharpe feared his throat was about to be cut, but instead the horseman began slashing at the pockets of Sharpe's uniform.

  He found the big key that opened Seringapatam's main magazine, a key that Sharpe had ordered cut in the bazaar so that he would not always have to fill in the form in the armoury guardhouse. The man tossed the key away, slit another pocket, found nothing valuable and so moved on to another body. Sharpe stared up at the sun.

  Somewhere nearby a garrison sepoy groaned, and almost immediately he was bayoneted and Sharpe heard the hoarse exhalation of breath as the man died and the sucking sound as the murderer dragged the blade back from the constricting flesh. It had all happened so fast! And Sharpe blamed himself, though he knew it was not his fault. He had not let the killers into the fort, but he had hesitated for a few seconds to throw his pack, pouches and cartridge box onto the fire, and now he chided himself because maybe he could have used those few seconds to save his six men.

  Except most of them had already been dead or dying when Sharpe had first realized there was a fight. He had been pissing against the back wall of the cook house store hut when a
musket ball ripped through the reed-mat wall and for a second or two he had just stood there, incredulous, hardly believing the shots and screams his ears registered, and he had not bothered to button his trousers, but just turned and saw the dying campfire and had thrown his pack onto it, and by the time he had cocked the musket and run back to where his men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.

  But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the small magazine.

  "Subadar!" the tall officer shouted. "Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!"

  Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice provided the answer.

  "Major Dodd, sahib?"

  "Subadar?"

  "Everything's loaded, sahib."

  "Then let's go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadar! Tell the men there'll be a reward."

  Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they?

  Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops.

  They were bastards, that's what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod.

  "Bastards," he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal's face and he wanted to weep for the boy.

  A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut. Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone.

  "Bastards!" he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at Phillips's corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He gagged as he walked into the cook house and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead. "Bastards!" He said the word again and again, helplessly and furiously, then he remembered his pack and so he stood again and went into the sunlight.

  The ashes of the fire were still hot and the charred canvas remnants of his pack and pouches glowed red as he found a stick and raked through the embers. One by one he found what he had hidden in the fire. The rupees that had been for hiring the carts, then the rubies and emeralds, diamonds and pearls, sapphires and gold. He fetched a sack of rice from the cook house and he emptied the grains onto the ground and filled the sack with his treasure. A king's ransom, it was, and it had been taken from a king four years before in the Water Gate at Seringapatam where Sharpe had trapped the Tippoo Sultan and shot him down before looting his corpse.

  Then, with the treasure clutched to his midriff, he knelt in the stench of Chasalgaon and felt guilty. He had survived a massacre. Anger mingled with his guilt, then he knew he had duties to do. He must find any others who had survived, he must help them, and he must work out how he could take his revenge.

  On a man called Dodd.

  * * *

  Major John Stokes was an engineer, and if ever a man was happy with his avocation, it was Major John Stokes. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as making things, whether it was a better gun carriage, a garden or, as he was doing now, improvements to a clock that belonged to the Rajah of Mysore. The Rajah was a young man, scarcely more than a boy indeed, and he owed his throne to the British troops who had ejected the usurping Tippoo Sultan and, as a result, relations between the palace and Seringapatam's small British garrison were good. Major Stokes had found the clock in one of the palace's antechambers and noted its appalling accuracy, which is why he had brought it back to the armoury where he was happily taking it apart.

  "It isn't signed," he told his visitor, "and I suspect it's local work. But a Frenchman had his hand in it, I can tell that. See the escapement? Typical French work, that."

  The visitor peered at the tangle of cogwheels.

  "Didn't know the Frogs had it in them to make clocks, sir," he said.

  "Oh, indeed they do!" Stokes said reprovingly. "And very fine clocks they make! Very fine. Think of Lepine! Think of Berthoud! How can you ignore Montandon? And Breguet!" The Major shook his head in mute tribute to such great craftsmen, then peered at the Rajah's sorry timepiece. "Some rust on the mainspring, I see. That don't help. Soft metal, I suspect. It's catch as catch can over here. I've noticed that. Marvellous decorative work, but Indians make shoddy mechanics. Look at that mainspring! A disgrace."

  "Shocking, sir, shocking." Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill did not know a mainspring from a pendulum, and could not have cared less about either, but he needed information from Major Stokes so it was politic to show an interest.

  "It was striking nine when it should have struck eight," the Major said, poking a finger into the clock's entrails, "or perhaps it was striking eight when it ought to have sounded nine. I don't recall. One to seven it copes with admirably, but somewhere about eight it becomes wayward."

  The Major, who was in charge of Seringapatam's armoury, was a plump, cheerful fellow with prematurely white hair.

  "Do you understand clocks, Sergeant?"

  "Can't say as I does, sir. A simple soldier, me, sir, who has the sun as his clock." The Sergeant's face twitched horribly. It was an uncontrollable spasm that racked his face every few seconds.

  "You were asking about Sharpe," Major Stokes said, peering into the clock. "Well, I never! This fellow has made the bearings out of wood! Good Lord above. Wood! No wonder she's wayward! Harrison once made a wooden clock, did you know? Even the gearings! All from timber."

  "Harrison, sir? Is he in the army, sir?"

  "He's a clock maker Sergeant, a clock maker. A very fine clock maker too."

  "Not a Frog, sir?"

  "With a name like Harrison? Good Lord, no! He's English, and he makes a good honest clock."

  "Glad to hear it, sir," Hakeswill said, then reminded the Major of the purpose of his visit to the armoury. "Sergeant Sharpe, sir, my good friend, sir, is he here?"

  "He is here," Stokes said, at last looking up from the clock, "or rather he was here. I saw him an hour ago. But he went to his quarters. He's been away, you see. Involved in that dreadful business in Chasalgaon."

  "Chiseldown, sir?"

  "Terrible business, terrible! So I told Sharpe to clean himself up. Poor fellow was covered in blood! Looked like a pirate. Now that is interesting."

  "Blood, sir?" Hakeswill asked.

  "A six-toothed scape wheel with a bifurcated locking piece! Well, I never! That is enriching the pudding with currants. Rather like putting an Egg lock on a common pistol! I'm sure if you wait. Sergeant, Sharpe will be back soon. He's a marvelous fellow. Never lets me down."

  Hakeswill forced a smile for he hated Sharpe with a rare and s
ingle minded venom.

  "He's one of the best, sir," he said, his face twitching. "And will he be leaving Seringapatam soon, sir? Off on an errand again, would he be?"

  "Oh no!" Stokes said, picking up a magnifying glass to look more closely into the clock. "I need him here, Sergeant. That's it, you see! There's a pin missing from the strike wheel. It engages the cogs here, do you see, and the gearing does the rest. Simple, I suppose." The Major looked up, but saw that the strange Sergeant with the twitching face was gone. Never mind, the clock was far more interesting.

  Sergeant Hakeswill left the armoury and turned left towards the barracks where he had temporary accommodation. The King's 33rd was quartered now in Hurryhur, a hundred and fifty miles to the north, and their job was to keep the roads of western Mysore clear of bandits and so the regiment ranged up and down the country and, finding themselves close to Seringapatam where the main armoury was located, Colonel Gore had sent a detachment for replacement ammunition. Captain Morris of the Light Company had drawn the duty, and he had brought half his men and Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill to protect the shipment which would leave the city next morning and be carried on ox carts to Arrakerry where the regiment was currently camped. An easy task, but one that had offered Sergeant Hakeswill an opportunity he had long sought.

  The Sergeant stopped in one of the grog shops and demanded arrack.

  The shop was empty, all but for himself, the owner and a legless beggar who heaved himself towards the Sergeant and received a kick in the rump for his trouble.

  "Get out of here, you scabby bastard!" Hakeswill shouted. "Bringing the flies in, you are. Go on! Piss off."

  The shop thus emptied to his satisfaction, Hakeswill sat in a dark corner contemplating life.

  "I chide myself," he muttered aloud, worrying the shop's owner who feared the look of the twitching man in the red coat. "Your own fault, Obadiah," Hakeswill said. "You should have seen it years ago! Years! Rich as a Jew, he is. Are you listening to me, you heathen darkie bastard?"

  The shop's owner, thus challenged, fled into the back room, leaving Hakeswill grumbling at the table.